Old Las Vegas TV commercials projected on a star from the Stardust sign being captured on a smartphone.

“Disconnected: The Creation of an American Phenomenon” is Lee Cannarozzo deftly responding to being raised in Las Vegas through a set of installations at UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery. It's summer story telling about growing up in the town of Paradise and being a young witness to the last of old Las Vegas, to feel the rumble of underground blasts and implosions, and to have local television be a Greek Chorus to unprecedented growth.

“An upbringing in Las Vegas is very unique,” Lee, 27, says. “It’s an experience that gives you a very interesting life perspective.”

As someone who also leads tours at The Neon Museum, his visual chronicles have a sophisticated panache.

Walking into the show, you are greeted with a boot. “Expansion” speaks to the city’s fast growth by presenting population stats on the gallery wall. Next to the data of years and numbers, a fiberglass foot with exposed metal sits on local desert sand. It’s one of a few body parts left of Fitzgerald's Mr. O' Lucky casino sign sculpture.

Las Vegas grew because Paradise had room for a faux reality aesthetic, which Lee acknowledges by showing the shape of unincorporated town that frames the Strip as a rich blue wall sculpture that hangs like a glowing monument.

Then there is "Growing Pains" that projects television footage from the late 1980s to early 90s on a battered star from the 188-feet high Stardust super pylon. It is a connection of fragmented memories from local television to a sign that Lee calls an “icon of commerce.”

“It was part of my upbringing, and part of my reality,’ says Lee, an UNLV undergrad majoring in art history, and now researching MFA programs that allows him to continue this practice.

“Disconnected” is a prototype for a self-imposed calling to find ways to mix curatorship with fine art. He says he wants to create “installation based work that deal with macro concepts of identity, society, and under represented historical issues."

Lance Smith at the Clark County resortation of his ZAP 7 art I Photo: PaintThisDesert

FIELD NOTES: The eradication and recovery of "Our Lady of Maryland Parkway," the ZAP 7 box by artist Lance Smith, changes the meaning of the piece. It is now a marker when artists, and the civic community that enables art, will rally and support public art when it is challenged. It also becomes a jumping off point to revisit text I first wrote for Clark County's ZAP 7 site map. Some will return original words that were edited for space. Others may touch on how the boxes have changed in meaning and representation. PtD starts with number 6 on the ZAP 7 Site Map (3993 to 3945 Maryland Parkway).

"Our Lady of Maryland Parkway" before being painted over I Photo: Paint This Desert

REVISITED: The main set of images on these utility boxes are figures posed in reflection and guidance, a guardian watching over the walkers and drivers along and on Maryland Parkway. The blue-hooded figure, in front of the distant desert mountain range, shows street smart spiritual fellowship on a main road that functions as passage, and a vessel that creates memory of the every day. It was painted within a project designed to bring artist's colors to Maryland Parkway. It was painted over in beige, perhaps, because it represented color.

An interesting pop-up installation happened in Los Angeles. "TURF: A Mini-Golf Project" was a temporary mini-golf course that had obstacles symbolizing urban ills, like "territory; housing affordability and environmental issues" There more at neighborhood blog The Eastsider.

Christo's “The Floating Piers" had so many visitors officials repairs are already needed I NYTimes

Leading UK art figures "reveal their shock, anger and revulsion at the vote to leave the EU" I The Guardian

ART21 "Exclusive" episode follows the fabrication of Martin Puryear's New York City public sculpture, "Big Bling."

The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art summer show will not clean and paint walls to the purist of white. “Permanent Collection/Impermanent Museum” exhibits the traces of previous exhibitions by highlighting "the subtle places where a careful investigator can find small remembrances of the artworks and exhibitions installed, de-installed and re-installed within the museum’s walls and ruminate on the remnants of the exhibition process." SMOCA

Cuban-born Angeleno Adolfo Nodal was once the general manager of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs. He had more than 150 vintage neon signs restored in LA. He's now doing the same work in Cuba with contemporary artist Kadir López Nieves IDeborah Vankin of the LATimes reports from Havana.

Courtesy of Jetsonorama and Icy & Sot

"Yellowcake" is the name of uranium contamination and has presence at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Street artists Jetsonorama and Icy & Sot are creating street art, the rural kind, that speaks to it. More photographs, plus some art film clips at Brooklyn Street Art.

Like you know who, artist Giovanni Valderas also uses pinatas as a visual reference. He will have new work at McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Texas. "The show is titled 'Forged Utopia' and fits into a larger series of programming called 'The New Urban Landscape; which the MAC is coordinating to address 'homelessness, displacement, gentrification, and immigration.' "Glass Tire

Also, at Jerry Saltz's Facebook feed, someone suggested the city "should erect a statue of [Cunningham] at the corner of 57th & Fifth" . . .waking while taking a photograph. "I wish I'd have written that," writes the art critic.

Maceo Montoya, UC Davis Chicana/o Studies, professor, on a workshop that led to a mural for ​Sacramento's Cesear Chavez Intermediate elementary school.

Courtesy MOCA

When “Art in the Streets” was being organized by Jeffrey Deitch, Gastman, and Aaron Rose, for MOCA, they "ran into an institutional knowledge gap, one that can be traced to the art world’s historical dismissal of street art.." The article explores how that has changed in the last few years. - Artsy